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You don’t need to read this page to run a race. It’s here for when someone asks “how do I know these times are right?” — a rider protesting a result, or a sanctioning body asking how you time.

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The short version

Every time you press a button, Time2Bike records the exact moment you pressed it, not “how long since the race started”. Everything else — elapsed times, places, gaps — is worked out from those moments afterwards. That one decision is what makes the rest work.

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What it buys you

If nobody pressed Start until two minutes in, the finishes are still correct — they’re real moments in time. Press Start whenever you get to it, and every elapsed time recalculates from the actual start.This is also why you can record finishes before pressing Start at all.
Each phone quietly checks itself against Time2Bike’s clock every few seconds and corrects for the difference. So a finish recorded on the phone at the line and a finish recorded on the phone at the feed zone are directly comparable, even if the two phones’ own clocks disagree.The screen shows how confident it is as a small ± milliseconds figure. On a normal race-day connection this is small enough for head-to-head racing.
A phone that spent an hour with no signal isn’t guessing when it reconnects. Every finish it holds is stamped with a real moment, so it slots into the right place in the results — not the end of the list.
Each entry carries its own identifier. If a phone with bad signal sends the same finish three times while retrying, it still counts once.
Time sync

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Precision

Times are always stored down to the millisecond. What you display is your choice, under Timer setup → How I am timing: Changing this later only changes what’s shown — the underlying times keep their full precision, so you can tighten it up if two riders tie.

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What to tell a rider who protests

Everything is recorded: what was entered, when, on which device, by whom, and every correction made afterwards. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is deleted outright — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both remain. So you can always answer “what did the finish line actually record, and who changed it?” See History & corrections.

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If the clock indicator looks bad

The ± milliseconds figure on the timing screen is how sure that phone is of its own clock. If it’s showing several hundred milliseconds:
  • It’ll usually tighten up on its own within a minute.
  • Move to a spot with better signal if it doesn’t.
  • Check the phone’s own clock is set to update automatically — a phone with the wrong date is the one thing that genuinely confuses it.
  • Pull down to refresh the page.
For everything except two-lane head-to-head racing, a few hundred milliseconds of uncertainty doesn’t change anyone’s result.